Bringing self-driving cars to NASCAR

Ever since mankind could go fast, we have longed to go faster. And ever since we’ve done work, we have longed to have someone else, or something else, do that work for us. You might already be familiar with our self-driving car project. We’ve spent years working on a tough engineering problem—how to create a hardware and software system capable of gathering and interpreting massive amounts of real-time data and acting on that knowledge swiftly and surely enough to navigate innumerable varieties of crowded thoroughfares without ever once (among other human frailties) exploding in a fit of road rage at the guy who just cut hard left across your lane without even bothering to flash his blinker. Well, our autonomous cars have now been...

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Google+ Hangout with the UN Secretary-General

We’re passionate about changing the world. But there’s another organization that’s equally passionate—and has been doing it a lot longer. For more than 60 years, the United Nations has worked to advance a global agenda on ending war and poverty, promoting human rights, protecting the environment and dealing with humanitarian crises—critical issues that will determine the quality of life for future generations to come.So we’re delighted that on Tuesday, April 10, some of the voices of the next generation will have the chance to participate in an exclusive global conversation with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon via a Google+ Hangout from the United Nations headquarters in New York. Six young people, selected in consultation with partners in civil society, academia and United Nations offices...

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Toward a simpler, more beautiful Google

Update 5:49pm: for our international readers, this post is also available in French,German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish (Latin America, Spain). - Ed.More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+, enjoying new ways to share in Search, Gmail, YouTube and lots of other places. It's still early days, and there’s plenty left to do, but we're more excited than ever to build a seamless social experience, all across Google.A critical piece of this social layer is a design that grows alongside our aspirations. So today we’re introducing a more functional and flexible version of Google+. We think you’ll find it easier to use and nicer to look at, but most importantly, it accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google.Navigation you can...

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Celebrating the Google Photography Prize Finalists

Back in November we announced the Google Photography Prize 2012, a competition offering student photographers a chance to share their best photographs with the world. Groundbreaking photographer Ansel Adams once said, “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs,” so we left the themes for submission suitably broad, with 10 categories that combined classic photography genres with online photography trends including “Night,” “Travel,” “Sound/Silence” and “Me.” We were thrilled by the interest in the contest: nearly 20,000 students from 146 countries took part, of which 100 were shortlisted. You can see these in the gallery on our website.Our judging panel of seven leading photography experts chose the 10 finalists whose work will be...

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Google World Inside view on ads review

This is the first in a series of posts that will provide greater transparency about how we make our ads safer by detecting and removing scam ads. -Ed. A few weeks ago, we posted here about our efforts in fighting bad ads, and we shared a video with the basics of how we do it. Today I wanted to delve a little deeper and give some insight into the systems we use to help prevent bad ads from showing. Ourads policies are designed with safety and trust in mind—we don’t allow ads formalicious downloads, counterfeit goods, or ads with unclear billing practices, to name a few examples. In order to help prevent these kinds of ads from showing, we use a combination of automated systems and human input to review the...

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Exploring Jerusalem’s Old City streets with Street View

Every year, 3.5 million people come to Israel to visit ancient sites that are holy to billions of people, to walk among the unique stone of Jerusalem, or to relax on the beaches of the Mediterranean.  Inside Jerusalem's Old City To help you explore Israel’s history and present, we’ve launched imagery of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa on Street View. You can explore the narrow streets of Jerusalem’s Old City and each of its four quarters, walk along the Via Dolorosa and see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, visit the Western Wall and theMount of Olives. You can stop by the Biblical Zoo, then visit the Israel Museum and the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum—and explore more with the Art Project and the Yad Vashem photo...

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